After holding out for years, some of the buzziest private companies might finally take the next step in 2026.
SpaceX and Anthropic are candidates for initial public offerings in the year ahead, as they chase more funding and look to better insulate themselves against the competition. That presents an exciting opportunity for investors, and one that will test the lofty valuations these companies have fetched in the private markets.
Elon Musk has already hinted that SpaceX could make its public debut in the new year. The space-technology company reportedly just conducted a tender offer that valued it at $800 billion.
And while OpenAI recently said it didn’t have IPO plans, some see its rival Anthropic as a more likely prospect. Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, hasn’t exactly had trouble raising funds as a private company, reportedly leading to a recent $350 billion valuation, according to CNBC. But with the relentless hunger for compute resources, the company might look to shore up funds in a new way.
“In order to stay competitive, they need to invest in their own infrastructure,” as well as in engineering talent, Santosh Rao, the head of research at Manhattan Venture Partners, told MarketWatch.
He sees a fairly hospitable climate for IPOs, after 2025 brought some high-profile public debuts, like Circle Internet and Figma, but none with the name recognition of SpaceX and Anthropic.
Interest rates are lower, which could support deal activity in general, as could the general maturity of some private companies. Deals might be more loaded toward the second half of the year, he noted.
But experts from consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers, doing business as PwC, flagged recently that there’s been only “selective investor appetite” for IPOs recently. Despite hot debuts for Circle, Figma and others, momentum has cooled significantly.
The Renaissance IPO ETF has fallen 6.7% over the past three months through Tuesday, to bring its year-to-date gain down to 6.1%. In comparison, the S&P 500 index has tacked on 3.1% the past three months and advanced 17.3% in 2025.
“This reflects a shift toward valuation realism, as investors prioritize sustainable growth and fundamentals in a higher-rate, post-zero interest rate environment,” PwC said in a recent report.
Here are some private companies that could test investor appetites in the new year.
SpaceX
After more than 23 years as a private company, Musk appears ready to take SpaceX public in a historic IPO.
The aerospace company aims for a $1.5 trillion valuation as it looks to raise about $30 billion. If SpaceX hits those targets, it would surpass Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion public listing in 2019 to become the largest public offering of all time by capital raised. The valuation would also rank SpaceX among the top 10 largest U.S. companies by market capitalization, based on current market values of public entities.
SpaceX leads the rocket launch market, though most of its revenue comes from its satellite internet business, Starlink. It’s expected to report $15.5 billion in revenue this year, Musk has said.
Funds from the IPO are expected to help SpaceX pay for its ambitious goals, which include sending Starship rockets to Mars and potentially solving the AI industry’s energy problem.
SpaceX’s planned public debut would also move Musk closer to becoming the first-ever modern trillionaire, thanks to his 42% stake in SpaceX. Its latest tender offer elevated his wealth to over $600 billion, or more than double the next two richest individuals’ combined net worth, according to Bloomberg News.
Anthropic
With a recently reported $350 billion valuation, Anthropic is smaller than OpenAI, but it’s no slouch.
The Financial Times recently reported that Anthropic was considering a 2026 IPO, having brought on lawyers, though the company’s timeline was debatable.
By going public, Anthropic could tap into funds needed to make its Claude product more competitive with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, both of which have stronger name recognition. But an IPO would also spotlight what’s thought to be a tough financial position for model providers. Executing upon user requests is resource intensive, and many people don’t pay at all for chatbots.
The company has differentiated itself in the fast-paced market by emphasizing tools for coding assistance, which do lend themselves to enterprise use cases. And the Wall Street Journal reported last month that Anthropic, while unprofitable, was on track to become profitable more quickly than OpenAI.
An Anthropic spokesperson pointed MarketWatch to recent comments from Chief Communications Officer Sasha de Marigny, who said at an Axios event earlier this month that the company had no immediate plans for an IPO filing.
Kraken
Several cryptocurrency-related companies went public in 2025, and Kraken is another that could test the waters in the new year.
The company, which runs a platform that lets people trade crypto and more, filed confidential IPO paperwork in November.
Investors in newly public crypto stocks have been on a wild journey this year, partly because crypto prices have turned lower. Circle’s stock is still 158% above its IPO price, but 70% off its closing peak reached on June 23.
But Rao sees Kraken with a more diversified business that could work out in its favor. “Their future is not dependent on how bitcoin does,” he said, because the company is working on tokening stocks and bonds for sale on its exchange
The company didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
Harvey
Many software companies say they’re using AI to improve their offerings, but Wall Street hasn’t been so convinced.
Soon there could be more AI-oriented software plays for investors to consider, including Harvey, a legal-services company recently valued at $8 billion, according to the New York Times. Earlier this year the company’s CEO signaled to The Lawyer, an industry publication, that a splash into the public markets was on the horizon.
“Our goal is to create a generational company so we are singularly focused on our customers and scaling the company right now,” a spokesperson told MarketWatch.
Harvey offers various products for the legal-services field. The company’s technology helps with the drafting of briefs and takes some of the manual work out of document analysis.
“The needle is moving, and will move more and more towards the application layer,” Rao said of the transition investors will see in the AI space.
Lambda Labs
Nvidia-backed Lambda Labs bills itself as “the superintelligence cloud,” offering cloud infrastructure that supports AI offerings.
“Our mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone in America the power of superintelligence,” the company says on its website. Lambda, which competes with the likes of CoreWeave and Nebius, recently inked a deal with Microsoft and just raised $1.5 billion in Series E funding.
The Information reported earlier this year that the company had hired bankers for an IPO.
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on its plans.
Cerebras
Another AI chip play could soon make its public debut, with Reuters reporting recently that Cerebras was close to filing for an offering.
The company already filed IPO documents in late 2024, but it didn’t move forward with its plans. That filing revealed that the company had heavy customer concentration and was losing money as of 2023.
Cerebras aims to compete with Nvidia, and MarketWatch has profiled its singular focus on AI, which hasspurred chips with high memory content.
